It looks something like 1948 for mainstream American news media today.

Donald Trump’s stunning victory in yesterday’s presidential election brought reminders of the embarrassment of 1948, when Thomas Dewey, the presumptive favorite for the presidency, was upset by President Harry S. Truman, much to the shock of the American press.

In the weeks and months before yesterday’s election, prominent media analysts predicted Trump was going to lose, and probably decisively, to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Notable among these misplaced predictions was that of Stuart Rothenberg, who wrote on August 9 at the Washington Post’sPowerPost blog:

“Three months from now, with the 2016 presidential election in the rearview mirror, we will look back and agree that the presidential election was over on Aug. 9th.

“Of course,” he added, “it is politically incorrect to say that the die is cast. …

“But a dispassionate examination of the data, combined with a coldblooded look at the candidates, the campaigns and presidential elections, produces only one possible conclusion: Hillary Clinton will defeat Donald Trump in November, and the margin isn’t likely to be as close as Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney” in 2008.

Trump won at least 290 electoral votes yesterday; Clinton, at least 228. Four years ago, Obama defeated Romney by an electoral count of 332-206.

In another essay at PowerPost a few days before the election, Rothenberg asserted: “Partisan pollsters on both sides” agreed it was “very unlikely that Trump will sweep all of the toss-up states and pick off one or two Clinton-leaning states, which he would need to do to win.”

Trump essentially accomplished just that: He won toss-up states Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, and Ohio, and flipped Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, both Democratic-leaning states where Clinton had been expected to win.

In a column published October 11, David Brooks of the New York Times ruminated about what he called “the essential loneliness of Donald Trump” and declared:

“On Nov. 9, the day after Trump loses, there won’t be solidarity and howls of outrage. Everyone will just walk away.”

Nate Silver, founder and editor of the widely followed Five Thirty Eight data-blog, wrote on October 20, the day after the third and final presidential debate of the campaign:

“I’m not sure I need to tell you this, but Hillary Clinton is probably going to be the next president. It’s just a question of what ‘probably’ means.”

Referring to Trump’s deficit of some seven percentage points in public opinion polling at that time, Silver declared:

“There aren’t really any direct precedents for a candidate coming back from this far down to win an American presidential election, although you can make a few loose analogies. Harry Truman’s comeback over Thomas Dewey in 1948 almost works as a comparison, but Truman wasn’t coming from as far behind as Trump is, and there was much less polling in 1948.”

New York magazine election cover

The Washington Postreported on October 20 that Trump’s performance at the third debate, at which he declined to say whether he would accept the election result, touched off a “wave of apprehension and anguish [that] swept the Republican Party … with many GOP leaders alarmed by Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the election and concluding that it is probably too late to salvage his flailing presidential campaign.”

Such eagerness to declare the election over prompted a rebuke from Howard Kurtz, an analyst and media reporter for Fox News.

“The tenor of the coverage certainly suggests that Donald Trump has no hope and Hillary Clinton is coasting to victory,” Kurtz wrote in a commentary posted October 24 at the Fox News site.

Many pundits, Kurtz noted, “are now portraying the billionaire’s plight as Mission Impossible.”

He added, presciently:

“I’m always more cautious than that. I’ve seen too many elections where a candidate bounced back after being written off, the polls were off, or some unexpected event moved the needle.” Such a development came 11 days before the election, when FBI Director James Comey announced the reopening of the agency’s investigation into Clinton’s use of private email while she was secretary of state. But then, two days before the election, Comey said Clinton should face no criminal charges.

The media prize for excessive self-confidence has to go to New York magazine: Its election issue cover featured a photograph of an angry Trump, a taunting sneer, “LOSER,” emblazoned across his face. The issue’s publication date was October 31.

The second edition includes a new preface, and three new chapters that discuss:

The myth of the first televised presidential debate in 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon — notably that television viewers and radio listeners reached dramatically different conclusions about who won the encounter. In Getting It Wrong, I characterize the notion of viewer-listener disagreement as “a robust trope” that’s often cited as “conclusive evidence of the power of television images and the triumph of image over substance.” I also present reasons why the debate of September 26, 1960, was at best a small factor in the outcome of the election, which Kennedy narrowly won.

The myths of the “Napalm Girl” photograph, taken in Vietnam in June 1972, which shows a cluster of children burned or terrorized by an errant napalm attack. I note the photograph has given rise to a variety of media myths — notably that American warplanes dropped the napalm. The attack was carried out by the South Vietnamese Air Force. Related myths are that the photograph was so powerful that it turned U.S. public opinion against the war, that it hastened an end to the war, and that it was published on newspaper front pages across the country. (Many leading U.S. daily newspapers did publish the photograph; many abstained.)

The spread of bogus quotations via social media and the Internet. Among the examples discussed in the new edition is this phony quotation, attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “Some of my finest hours have been spent on my back veranda, smoking hemp and observing as far as my eye can see.” The utterance, I point out, is found in none of Jefferson’s writings. And there is no evidence the third U.S. president smoked hemp or other substances, including tobacco. Even so, the obviously preposterous quote — like many others attributed to important men and women of the past — “is too alluring and oddly amusing to drift away as so much historical rubbish,” I write.

The second edition of Getting It Wrong also explores the tenacity of prominent media myths, calling attention to the roles of celebrities and luminaries — authors, entertainers, and social critics, as well as politicians and talk show hosts — in amplifying dubious or apocryphal tales about the news media and their power.

The upshot of the celebrity effect, I write, is scarcely trivial: The prominence of luminaries helps ensure that the myths will reach wide audiences, making the myths all the more difficult to uproot. The importance of the celebrity effect in the diffusion of media myths has become better recognized, and better documented, in the years since publication in 2010 of the first edition of Getting It Wrong, I point out.

I further note that for journalists, media myths “are very seductive: They place the news media at the epicenter of vital and decisive moments of the past, they tell of journalistic bravado and triumph, and they offer memorable if simplistic narratives that are central to journalism’s amour propre.

“They also encourage an assumption that, the disruption and retrenchment in their field notwithstanding, journalists can be moved to such heights again.”

The hoary myth of Richard Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam has surfaced with some frequency in recent days as commentators across the political spectrum stretch for parallels between Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and the campaign Nixon ran in 1968.

These commentators — writing for such diverse sources as the New York Post, the NationalInterest, the Daily Beast, History News Network, among others — have referred to Nixon’s “secret plan” as if such a pledge figured in his run for the White House 48 years ago.

So of late, we’ve had the New York Postdeclaring flatly that Nixon in 1968 “ran against the Vietnam War by claiming he had a ‘secret plan’ to end it.” We’ve had the National Interest — in a commentary headlined, “Can Trump Follow Nixon to Victory?” — asserting that “Nixon said he had a ‘secret plan’ to end” the war.

We’ve had a political columnist writing in the Lowell Sun in Massachusetts that Nixon “said he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam — a war that was tearing the country apart.”

And we’ve had the History News Network, which seeks to place “current events into historical perspective,” stating that “Richard Nixon won the presidency, mainly based on his ‘secret plan’ to end the Vietnam War and his tough stance on law and order.”

What has encouraged those and other outsize references to Nixon’s “secret plan” has been Trump’s repeated if vague promise to wipe out ISIS, the radical Islamic terror organization that has seized portions of Syria and Iraq and has taken responsibility for murderous attacks in Europe and the United States. Trump, for example, declared in an interview that aired Sunday on 60 Minutes, “We’re going to declare war against ISIS. We have to wipe out ISIS.”

Trump offered few details on occasions he has spoken about ISIS — a vagueness that seemed redolent of candidate Nixon’s saying he had a “secret plan” for Vietnam.

But Nixon pointedly and publicly dismissed such a notion: In an article published March 28, 1968, in the Los Angeles Times, he was quoted as saying he had “no gimmicks or secret plans” for Vietnam.

“If I had any way to end the war,” Nixon was further quoted as saying, “I would pass it on to President [Lyndon] Johnson.” (Nixon’s remarks were made just days before Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.)

Now Nixon may or may not have had a “secret plan” in mind in 1968. But such a claim wasn’t a feature of his campaign. That becomes quite clear in reviewing the search results of a full-text database of leading U.S. newspapers in 1968, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune.

The search terms “Nixon” and “secret plan” returned no articles during the period from January 1, 1967, to January 1, 1969, in which Nixon was quoted as saying he had a “secret plan” for Vietnam. (The search period included the months of Nixon’s presidential campaign and its aftermath.)

As I’ve noted several times at Media Myth Alert, if Nixon had campaigned in 1968 on a “secret plan” for Vietnam, the country’s leading newspapers certainly would have reported it.

The “secret plan” anecdote is likely derived from a speech Nixon made on March 5, 1968, in Hampton, New Hampshire, in which he declared that “new leadership” in Washington would “end the war” in Vietnam.

The wire service United Press International, in reporting on Nixon’s remarks, pointed out that the candidate “did not spell out how” he would “end the war.” The UPI account also noted that “Nixon’s promise recalled Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pledge in 1952, when Nixon was his running mate, to end the war in Korea.” Eisenhower was elected president that year.

A New York Times account of Nixon’s speech, published March 6, 1968, quoted the candidate as saying he “could promise ‘no push-button technique’ to end the war. Nixon also said he was not suggesting ‘withdrawal’ from Vietnam.” A brief follow-on report published in the Times that day quoted Nixon as saying he envisioned applying military pressure as well as diplomatic efforts in seeking to end the war.

A fine recent book about the tumultuous 1968 presidential election briefly takes up, and promptly dismisses, the “secret plan” claim.

Like many other media-driven myths, it’s a tale almost too good, and too delicious, to resist. (William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter and columnist for the New York Times, periodically called attention to the “secret plan” myth, once observing: “Like the urban myth of crocodiles in the sewers, the [Nixon] non-quotation never seems to go away ….”)

Most recently, the bogus anecdote found its way into a USA Todayarticle about campaign promises presidential candidates failed to keep.

The article, which was re-posted yesterday at the Web site of a New Orleans television station, declared, flatly:

“Richard Nixon, campaigning in 1968, claimed he had a ‘secret plan’ to end the Vietnam War.”

No source or citation was offered.

Nixon never touted a “secret plan” to end the war. In fact, he pointedly and publicly disavowed such a notion. In an article published March 28, 1968, in the Los Angeles Times, Nixon was quoted as saying he had “no gimmicks or secret plans” for Vietnam.

“If I had any way to end the war,” he was further quoted as saying, “I would pass it on to President [Lyndon] Johnson.” (Nixon’s remarks were made just a few days before Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.)

Nixon may or may not have had a “secret plan” in mind in 1968. But he did not make such a claim a feature of his campaign that year. That much is clear in reviewing the search results of a full-text database of leading U.S. newspapers in 1968, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune.

The search terms “Nixon” and “secret plan” returned no articles during the period from January 1, 1967, to January 1, 1969, in which Nixon was quoted as saying he had a “secret plan” for Vietnam. (The search period included the months of Nixon’s presidential campaign and its aftermath.)

If Nixon had claimed during the 1968 campaign to possess a “secret plan” for Vietnam, the country’s leading newspapers surely would have publicized it.

It is clear that Nixon’s foes tried to foist the “secret plan” calumny on him. For example, supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Hubert H. Humphrey took out a display advertisement in the New York Times on October 23, 1968; the ad included this statement: “Last March he said he had a secret plan to end the war.”

The ad included no reference to exactly when or where Nixon had made such a statement. And it carried the headline, “Trust Humphrey.”

The derivation of the “secret plan” anecdote can be traced to March 5, 1968, and a speech in Hampton, New Hampshire, in which Nixon declared that “new leadership” in Washington — a Nixon administration, in other words — would “end the war” in Vietnam.

The wire service United Press International, in reporting on Nixon’s remarks, pointed out that the candidate “did not spell out how” he would “end the war.” The UPI dispatch also said “Nixon’s promise recalled Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pledge in 1952, when Nixon was his running mate, to end the war in Korea.” Eisenhower was elected president that year.

The New York Times account of Nixon’s speech, published March 6, 1968, quoted him as saying he “could promise ‘no push-button technique’ to end the war. Nixon also said he was not suggesting ‘withdrawal’ from Vietnam.” A brief, follow-on report published in the Times that day quoted Nixon as saying he envisioned applying military pressure as well as diplomatic efforts in ending the war.

But Nixon wasn’t inclined to say much specifically about Vietnam. Michael A. Cohen writes in AmericanMaelstrom, a recently published book about political upheaval in America in 1968:

“Nixon knew he had little to gain by talking about Vietnam. Doing so would give his opponents the ammunition with which to attack him; not doing so allowed potential supporters to believe whatever they wanted about his intentions. And if elected president he would enter office with no embarrassing campaign pronouncements to explain away.”

Whether movie director Steven Spielberg is aware of those aspects of the back story to the mythical “Cronkite Moment” of 1968 is not known.

But it may matter, given a report from Hollywood that Spielberg is contemplating a movie that effectively would embrace the myths that have grown up around the presumed effects of Cronkite’s on-air assessment.

Deadline Hollywood said yesterday at its online site that the Cronkite-movie project, while tentative, would “focus on Cronkite’s relationship with the Vietnam War and the role that America’s most trusted newsman played in turning public opinion against the increasingly un-winnable conflict. So influential was the CBS Evening News anchor that then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson is believed to have remarked, ‘If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.'”

If that’s even a rough outline of the prospective Spielberg project, the resulting movie would be steeped in media myth. Indeed, Deadline Hollywood’s descriptive paragraph quoted above incorporated no fewer than three myths, specifically about:

“Most trusted”: It was not until 1972 when Cronkite began to be called the “most trusted” newsman; even then, the characterization was the inspiration of the CBS advertising department and based on research that can only be described as flimsy.

Public opinion: Evidence is scant at best that Cronkite’s pronouncement about Vietnam in February 1968 had any effect in turning American public opinion against the war. Indeed, Cronkite was more follower than leader in the public’s shifting views about Vietnam.

It is known that Johnson did not watch Cronkite’s report about Vietnam when it aired on February 27, 1968. The president then was in Austin, Texas, attending a black-tie birthday party for Governor John Connally, a long-time political ally who turned 51 that day.

About the time Cronkite was intoning his “mired in stalemate” assessment, Johnson was jesting about Connally’s age; he wasn’t lamenting the loss of an anchorman’s support. “Today, you are 51, John,” the president said. “That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for — a simple majority.”

As I noted in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, Johnson in the days and weeks following the Cronkite report was adamantly and publicly hawkish about the war, asserting in a speech in mid-March 1968, for example:

“Make no mistake about it. … We are going to win.”

What’s more, Cronkite said nothing in his report about the war that hadn’t been said previously by leading journalists. By early 1968, “stalemate” was an exceedingly unoriginal way of characterizing the conflict.

Months before the ‘Cronkite Moment’

In August 1967, for example, the New York Times published a lengthy analysis that declared “the war is not going well. Victory is not close at hand.”

The analysis also said:

“‘Stalemate’ is a fighting word in Washington. President Johnson rejects it as a description of the situation in Vietnam. But it is the word used by almost all Americans here [in Saigon, capital of what was South Vietnam], except the top officials, to characterize what is happening.”

The Times report was published on its front page beneath the headline:

“To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.”

Cronkite’s assessment was far less assertive than the observations offered less than two weeks later by Frank McGee of the rival NBC network. “The war,” McGee said on an NBC News program that aired March 10, 1968, “is being lost by the [Johnson] administration’s definition.”

Not stalemated. Lost.

And four days before Cronkite’s report, the Wall Street Journal said in an editorial that the U.S. war effort in Vietnam “may be doomed” and that “everyone had better be prepared for the bitter taste of defeat beyond America’s power to prevent.”

Interestingly, Cronkite for years dismissed the notion his “mired in stalemate” commentary was of great consequence.

In his 1997 memoir, Cronkite said his “stalemate” assessment was for Johnson “just one more straw in the increasing burden of Vietnam.” Cronkite repeated the analogy in the years immediately afterward, saying in 1999 on a CNN program:

“I think our broadcast simply was another straw on the back of a crippled camel.”

Not until late in his life did Cronkite embrace the supposed impact of the presumptive “Cronkite Moment,” telling Esquire in 2006: “To be honest, I was rather amazed that my reporting from Vietnam had such an effect on history.”

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, popular support for the war had begun slipping months before the Cronkite report. The shift in opinions had become apparent by Fall 1967.

A Gallup poll conducted in October 1967 found for the first time that a plurality of Americans — 47 percent — believed that sending troops to fight in Vietnam had been a mistake.

Slightly more than two years earlier, only 24 percent of respondents said they thought it was a mistake to have deployed American forces to Vietnam.

Gallup asked the question again in a poll completed on the day that Cronkite’s program aired: Forty-nine percent of the respondents said U.S. military intervention in Vietnam had been a mistake; 42 percent said it had not been.

In April 1968, Gallup found that 48 percent of respondents said U.S. military intervention in Vietnam had been a mistake; 42 percent said it had not.

Moreover, print journalists had detected a softening of support for the war well before Cronkite’s “mired in stalemate” assessment.

In December 1967, for example, a national correspondent for the Knight newspapers, Don Oberdorfer, noted that summer and fall that year had “been a time of switching, when millions of American voters — along with many religious leaders, editorial writers and elected officials — appeared to be changing their views about the war.”

Assailing Donald Trump’s foreign policy credentials, and his recent speech on the topic, is hardly a demanding task. The blustery frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination exhibits little more than shallow familiarity with national security issues.

But Trump’s superficiality hasn’t stopped critics from overreaching as they lambaste him on foreign policy — overreaching to the point of summoning the media myth about Richard Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam. Activist Phyllis Bennis did just that the other day in an appearance on the MSNBC primetime program, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.

In his speech last week, Trump vowed to eradicate ISIS, the radical Islamic State, early in his presidency, but didn’t explain how that would be accomplished. With unconcealed smugness, Bennis declared that Trump’s reference to ISIS “was very reminiscent of Nixon’s call when he was running for president [in 1968] and said, ‘I have a secret plan to end the war.’ The secret plan of course turned out to be escalation.”

Her remark about Nixon’s “secret plan” gained fresh circulation yesterday in a post at a Huffington Post politics blog.

But it’s a claim Nixon never made. And he didn’t campaign for the presidency touting a “secret plan” on Vietnam.

That he did not is made clear in the search results of a full-text database of leading U.S. newspapers in 1968, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. The search terms “Nixon” and “secret plan” returned no articles during the period from January 1, 1967, to January 1, 1969, in which Nixon was quoted as saying he had a “secret plan” for Vietnam. (The search period included all of Nixon’s presidential campaign and its immediate aftermath.)

Surely, had Nixon campaigned on a “secret plan” in 1968, as Bennis so blithely asserted, the country’s leading newspapers would have publicized it.

Nixon did confront the notion he had a “secret plan” for Vietnam. In an article published March 28, 1968, in the Los Angeles Times, he was quoted as saying he had “no gimmicks or secret plans” for Vietnam.

Nixon also said:

“If I had any way to end the war, I would pass it on to President [Lyndon] Johnson.” (Nixon’s remarks were made just a few days before Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.)

Nixon may or may not have had a “secret plan” in mind in 1968. But he did not make such a claim a feature of his campaign that year. (William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter and columnist for the New York Times, periodically called attention to the “secret plan” myth, once observing: “Like the urban myth of crocodiles in the sewers, the non-quotation never seems to go away ….”)

Nixon’s foes, however, tried to pin the “secret plan” calumny on him. Supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Hubert H. Humphrey, for example, took out a display advertisement in the New York Times on October 23, 1968; the ad included this statement: “Last March he said he had a secret plan to end the war.”

The ad included no reference to exactly when or where Nixon had made such a statement. And it carried the headline, “Trust Humphrey.”

The derivation of the “secret plan” tale can be traced to March 5, 1968 and a speech in Hampton, New Hampshire, in which Nixon said “new leadership” in Washington — a Nixon administration, in other words — would “end the war” in Vietnam.

The wire service United Press International noted in reporting Nixon’s vague remarks that the candidate “did not spell out how” he would “end the war.” The UPI dispatch also said “Nixon’s promise recalled Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pledge in 1952, when Nixon was his running mate, to end the war in Korea.” Eisenhower was elected president that year.

The New York Times account of Nixon’s speech, published March 6, 1968, quoted the former vice president as saying he “could promise ‘no push-button technique’ to end the war. Nixon said he was not suggesting ‘withdrawal’ from Vietnam.” A brief, follow-on report that day in the Times quoted Nixon as saying he envisioned applying military pressure as well as diplomatic efforts in ending the war.

Nixon may have been vague during the 1968 campaign in describing his ideas about Vietnam. But clearly he wasn’t touting, proclaiming, or otherwise running on a “secret plan.”

Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times that “the real excitement of ‘All The President’s Men’ is in watching two comparatively inexperienced reporters stumble onto the story of their lives and develop it triumphantly, against all odds.” He was referring to Washington Postreporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who were played in the movie by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, respectively.

“’All the President’s Men’ is a terrific movie – the best film about newspaper reporters ever made, one of the most enjoyable action pictures you’ll see this year and a classic example of how to make an important social and political statement within the framework of an unpretentious detective story whose revelations speak for themselves.”

The gushing for All the President’s Men resumed this month as a variety of media outlets took the occasion of the 40th anniversary to celebrate the film anew.

Michael Gaynor of Washingtonian magazine put together a lengthy oral history about All the President’s Men, which he hailed as the “most defining movie of Washington.” Meanwhile, Newsday posted its 1976 review online.

In a lengthy retrospective for the Los Angeles Review of Books,the associate producer of All the President’s Men, Jon Boorstin, called the movie “a miracle.” He further described it as an “impossible conjunction of talent and opportunity, collaboration and ego, trust, power, and luck. And then more luck.”

And the Washington Post — inclined as it is to bouts of self-absorption — published at its online site a fawning essay that gushed at the granular level, telling us about Woodward and Bernstein’s favorite scenes in All the President’s Men.

What went unmentioned in the anniversary’s nostalgic glow was the movie’s significant contributions to the mythology of Watergate, notably the notion that Woodward and Bernstein‘s reporting — the movie’s centerpiece — brought down the corrupt presidency of Richard M. Nixon in 1974.

I call it the heroic-journalist myth, a simplistic version that sweeps away the complexities of Watergate, leaving an easy-to-grasp explanation for Nixon’s downfall in August 1974.

The cinematic version of All the President’s Men, as I noted in my 2010 book, Getting It Wrong, promoted this version — what I called an “unmistakable assertion of the power and centrality of the press in Nixon’s fall.

“All the President’s Men allows no other interpretation: It was the work Woodward and Bernstein that set in motion far-reaching effects that brought about the first-ever resignation of a U.S. president. And it is a message that has endured,” I wrote.

I further noted in Getting It Wrong that rolling up a scandal of Watergate’s dimensions in fact “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then,” I wrote, “Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of the burglary in June 1972 that was Watergate’s seminal crime.

The movie contributed to Watergate’s mythology in another way: It brought into the vernacular what has become the scandal’s most memorable line — “follow the money.”

It’s often said that “follow the money” was sage counsel offered by the stealthy, high-level “Deep Throat” source, with whom Woodward periodically met as the scandal unfolded.

CNN touts its new, six-part series about memorable races for the White House as presenting “the drama of how a high-stakes presidential election can turn on a single issue and so much more.”

A better way to put it is that it offers up a hoary media myth. That at least was a fundamental flaw of last night’s first installment of the quasi-documentary series known as “Race for the White House.”

The hour-long debut was a superficial, even cheesy take on the 1960 campaign between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon, a race that CNN claimed turned on the first-ever televised debate, which took place in Chicago on September 26, 1960.

Without providing evidence, CNN asserted that Nixon was regarded as the debate winner among many radio listeners — but Kennedy was seen as the winner by television viewers.

This is a popular and inviting notion that on its face seems plausible: Nixon, after all, cut no suave appearance during the debate that night in Chicago, not with sweat clearly beading on his chin and upper lip.

But the claim that TV viewers and radio listeners came away with clashing interpretations of the debate’s outcome is a myth that was thoroughly demolished nearly 30 years ago in an academic journal article by David L. Vancil and Sue D. Pendell.

They noted that accounts of viewer-listener disagreement about the debate typically were anecdotal and impressionistic — and hardly representative of the American electorate in 1960.

They pointed out that no public opinion surveys conducted in the immediate aftermath of the debate were aimed at gauging the reactions radio audiences.

They wrote that the few surveys that even hinted at a viewer-listener clash were too small and unreliable to allow for telling assessments.

Debate, 1960: Not everyone thought Nixon looked terrible

They also observed: “Even if viewers disliked Nixon’s physical appearance, the relative importance of this factor is a matter of conjecture.”

It’s revealing to note that a good deal of post-debate commentary described the Kennedy-Nixon encounter as a draw.

Indeed, contemporaneous assessments of columnists and critics were hardly unanimous about who won the debate. The commonplace belief nowadays — that Kennedy looked so good on television that he won the debate hands down — was not at all a dominant theme in news reports and commentaries published in the days after the debate, the first of four that fall.

For example, a reporter for the old Philadelphia Evening Bulletin wrote that “it could hardly be said that either man had won.” Syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop observed:

“Neither man fell flat on his face. Neither even stumbled.”

The debate moderator, Howard K. Smith, later said he thought “Nixon was marginally better” than Kennedy.

James Reston, then the Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, wrote: “Who took the first round is a matter of individual opinion. My own view is that Kennedy gained more than Nixon, but it was a fielder’s choice, settling nothing.”

The Washington Post saw Nixon as the winner, stating in a post-debate editorial:

“Of the two performances, Mr. Nixon’s was probably the smoother. He is an accomplished debater with a professional polish, and he managed to convey a slightly patronizing air of a master instructing a pupil.”

To be sure, not everyone thought Nixon looked terrible that night. Saul Pett, a prominent feature writer for the Associated Press who won a Pulitzer Prize several years later, gave Nixon high marks for cordiality.

“On general folksiness both before and during the debate,” Pett wrote, “my scorecard showed Nixon ahead at least 8 to 1. … He smiled more often and more broadly, especially at the start and close of a remark. Kennedy only allowed himself the luxury of a quarter-smile now and then.”

Syndicated columnist Harriett Van Horne described both candidates as “visibly anxious, watching as a tiger while his opponent was speaking. … Mr. Nixon looked made up. Obviously somebody had de-fluffed his shaggy brows. Sen. Kennedy’s hair no longer falls in his eyes … but he looked as if he’d not slept well recently.”

Partisan leanings inevitably edged into post-debate assessments.

Thomas O’Neill, a political columnist for the Baltimore Sun and no friend of Nixon, likened the vice president’s appearance on television to that of a mug shot on a wanted poster. (O’Neill’s name appeared on Nixon’s “enemies list” that was released in 1973 during the Watergate scandal.)

The conservative San Diego Union, no friend of Kennedy, said in an editorial that the debate had “emphasized the painful superficiality and intellectual cynicism of Sen. Kennedy.”

Probably more damaging to Nixon than his washed-out appearance that night were his tactics, especially at the outset of the debate. He committed the elementary mistake of seeming to concur with Kennedy’s points rather than disputing them. Nixon blundered in projecting a “me-too” sentiment from the start.

The columnist Alsop wrote, sarcastically, that “Vice President Nixon insisted so strongly that he shared all Senator Kennedy’s worthy goals that one expected a Nixonian endorsement of the Democratic platform at any moment.”

The CNN program contained other errors. The journalist-historian Evan Thomas was among the authorities interviewed for the show and he claimed that Kennedy prepared for the debate by taking time away from the campaign trail. Not so: As the Chicago Tribune reported, Kennedy received “a boisterous welcome” in an appearance on the afternoon of the debate at a carpenters union convention in Chicago.

The program also referred to Kennedy as almost unknown at the time of his run for the presidency.

Kennedy, the junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts, was so well known in the late 1950s that he ran well ahead of Nixon in some presidential trial heats that the Gallup polling organization conducted nationally in late 1958 and 1959.

Those matchups, while volatile, were early tests of the prospective candidates’ political strength.

For example, a Gallup trial heat in December 1958 had Kennedy leading Nixon, 59 percent to 41 percent.

Kennedy was favored over Nixon by a larger margin, 61 percent to 39 percent, in a trial heat reported in July 1959.

Even the CNN show even seemed to take issue with its claim about Kennedy’s having been something of an unknown. Larry Sabato, another historian interviewed on the program, likened the Kennedy phenomenon to that of the Beatles, before Beatlemania broke across America in 1964.

The mythical tale that Richard M. Nixon ran for president in 1968 touting a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War is a dubious bit of political lore that has proven quite resistant to debunking. William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter and columnist for the New York Times, once called the “secret plan” chestnut a “non-quotation [that] never seems to go away.”

Quite so.

The chestnut made an appearance yesterday in a Politico Magazine essay ruminating about the foreign policy smarts of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

“Candidate Nixon said he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam but never said what it was.”

It’s a claim that Nixon never made — a claim he even tried to knock down.

But it lives on, irresistibly, as presumptive evidence of Nixon’s fecklessness and his scheming ways.

The tale’s derivation can be traced to March 5, 1968 and a speech in Hampton, New Hampshire, in which Nixon said that “new leadership” in Washington — a Nixon administration, that is — would “end the war” in Vietnam.

The wire service United Press International noted in reporting Nixon’s remarks that the candidate “did not spell out how” he would “end the war.” The UPI dispatch also said “Nixon’s promise recalled Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pledge in 1952, when Nixon was his running mate, to end the war in Korea.” Eisenhower was elected president that year.

What ‘secret plan’?

The New York Times account of Nixon’s speech, published March 6, 1968, quoted the candidate as saying he “could promise ‘no push-button technique’ to end the war. He said he was not suggesting ‘withdrawal’ from Vietnam.” A brief, follow-on report that day in the Times quoted Nixon as saying he envisioned applying military pressure as well as diplomatic efforts in ending the war.

Nixon may have been vague in describing his ideas about Vietnam.

But clearly he was not touting a “secret plan.”

That he wasn’t is underscored by the search results of a full-text database of leading U.S. newspapers in 1968, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. The search terms “Nixon” and “secret plan” returned no articles during the period from January 1, 1967, to January 1, 1969, in which Nixon was quoted as saying he had a “secret plan” for Vietnam. (The search period included all of Nixon’s presidential campaign and its immediate aftermath.)

Surely, had Nixon promised or campaigned on a “secret plan” in 1968, the country’s leading newspapers would have picked up on it.

Moreover, an article published March 28, 1968, in the Los Angeles Times reported that Nixon addressed the notion, saying he had “no gimmicks or secret plans” for Vietnam.

Nixon further stated:

“If I had any way to end the war, I would pass it on to President [Lyndon] Johnson.” (Nixon’s remarks were made just a few days before Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.)

Nixon may or may not have had a “secret plan” in mind in 1968. But he did not make such a claim a feature of his campaign that year.

Nixon’s political foes, however, tried to pin the “secret plan” calumny on him. For example, supporters of Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey took out a large display advertisement in the New York Times on October 23, 1968; the ad included this statement: “Last March he said he had a secret plan to end the war.”

The ad included no reference about exactly when or where Nixon had made such a statement. And it carried the headline, “Trust Humphrey.”

It is a heroic narrative that found mention today’s New York Times, in an article discussing two movies about journalists that could be contenders this year for Academy Awards.

One of them is Truth, a perversely titled film that celebrates former CBS News anchor Dan Rather and producer Marla Mapes who in 2004 used bogus documents to claim President George W. Bush dodged wartime service in Vietnam. No way does that movie deserve Oscar consideration. The other contender-film is titled Spotlight.

But what most interests Media Myth Alert is the Times article’s blithe and mistaken reference to “the investigation by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that led to Richard M. Nixon’s resignation.”

“All the President’s Men allows no other interpretation: It was the work Woodward and Bernstein that set in motion far-reaching effects that brought about the first-ever resignation of a U.S. president. And it is a message that has endured.”

To roll up a scandal of Watergate’s dimensions, I wrote in Getting It Wrong, “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then, Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of the burglary in June 1972 that was Watergate’s seminal crime.

Principals at the Post have, over the years, rejected the simplistic notion that the newspaper’s reporting led Nixon to resign.

Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher during Watergate, said in 1997, for example:

“Sometimes people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didn’t do. The processes that caused [Nixon’s] resignation were constitutional.”

In 2005, Michael Getler, then the Post’s ombudsman, or in-house critic, wrote:

“Ultimately, it was not The Post, but the FBI, a Congress acting in bipartisan fashion and the courts that brought down the Nixon administration. They saw Watergate and the attempt to cover it up as a vast abuse of power and attempted corruption of U.S. institutions.”

Not even Woodward has embraced the heroic-journalist myth. He once told an interviewer for American Journalism Review:

And in an interview with the PBS “Frontline” program, Woodward said “the mythologizing of our role in Watergate has gone to the point of absurdity, where journalists write … that I, single-handedly, brought down Richard Nixon. Totally absurd.”

Today’s article wasn’t the first time the Times has turned to the mythical claim about the Post’s Watergate reporting.

In a cover article in 2014, the Times Sunday magazine mentioned Woodward and Bernstein, saying they “actually managed to take down a mendacious American president, and in doing so they came to symbolize the hope and heroism of a new generation.”

And in 2008,in an article about Woodward’s finally introducing his high-level Watergate source to Bernstein, the Times referred to the “two young Washington Post reporters [who] cracked the Watergate scandal and brought down President Richard M. Nixon.”